Inside the mind of sex offenders

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Your message has been sent! Your email will only be seen by the event organizer. Your Name. Email Address. Enter the code as shown below:. To counteract the problem, the Organization for Autism Research in May published an online sex-education module for autistic people 15 years old and up. Kelmar is also introducing legislation in Virginia that would require sex education for students with intellectual disabilities.

Aside from providing information, pornography can be attractive to autistic teenagers and young adults for another reason: Its networks provide them with a social outlet, making them feel liked and accepted.

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Mesibov once worked with a year-old autistic boy who went to prison for sharing child pornography. The boy had been encouraged by online predators to join child porn chat rooms, where he felt appreciated and included. He was required to stay in his apartment between 8 p. The expectations of group therapy — having to engage socially and share personal details with strangers who were also sex offenders — made him extremely anxious, and the information he got from the group was confusing, too.

According to Dubin, the group leader told him that by being open and honest, he could shorten his sentence, but privately, people in the group told him that anything he said could be used against him in court.

Probation and Pretrial Services System. The prosecution refused.

He did not go to prison but was required to register as a sex offender. Life on the sex offender registry is never easy, but it can be especially difficult for someone on the spectrum. First, the registry comes with residence restrictions — in some states, offenders cannot live within 1, feet of a school or places where children congregate.

Erin Comartin , associate professor of social work at Wayne State University in Detroit, once calculated that there were only two homes in all of Ferndale, Michigan, a suburb near where Dubin resides, in which sex offenders are legally allowed to live. Because many autistic people live with their parents, these residency requirements often mean the entire family is forced to move. The registry also makes it more difficult for people with autism to get jobs than it already is. In what may be the worst possible outcome, autistic sex offenders can also end up in prison.

Sentences for child pornography have skyrocketed in recent years; they averaged 34 months in , but 66 months in At the conference, a man named Tom, who asked to be referred to by his first name only, choked up when describing the day he had had to drive his autistic son to prison after a child pornography conviction.

Mahoney says one of his autistic clients, who spent nearly two-and-a-half years in prison for possessing child pornography, has attempted suicide several times since he was released. Mahoney and others argue that autistic people who are first-time sex offenders and have had no inappropriate contact with children should not spend time in prison or be put on the registry.

And they are making progress on this front. At the Rochester conference, Mahoney said there were eight cases he knew of in federal courts in which prosecutors had allowed individuals on the spectrum to plead guilty to offenses without requiring prison time or registration, or had agreed to pretrial diversions.

Autistic people should also be exempt from the usual treatments for sex offenders, Mahoney and others say. These treatments typically involve rehabilitating deviant thoughts and correcting aberrant beliefs about sexuality — but what people on the spectrum need instead is basic information about what is appropriate and what is not, which they may never have been given before.

Dubin, now 42, has had ongoing therapy and education, and has spent the past nine years trying to atone for his mistakes. This article has been revised. The original incorrectly stated that Nick Dubin views children and teenagers as his peers.

Child sexual abuse in Australia

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The Etiology of Sexual Offending Behavior and Sex Offender Typology: An Overview

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